It's also among the best that director Scott Edmiston has done, which is saying quite a bit, as that body of work includes the Nora Theatre Company's ''Betrayal," Gloucester Stage's ''Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris," and Opera Boston's ''Nixon in China." These five one-acts are not top-of-the-line Tennessee, but Edmiston makes the case that the lesser work of a great artist is of more interest than the best work of a good craftsman.
Any artist of Williams's stature creates a world of his own that says things about the world at large. ''Five by Tenn" brings Williams's universe of French Quarter loneliness and quiet desperation fully alive. It's peopled with love-starved poets and romantic drag queens wanting more than society says they can have, but often settling for sex with the wrong people or boozy fantasies.
Credit goes primarily to Edmiston for crafting these six pieces into such a cohesive whole. For example, Eric Rubbe plays a painfully shy usher in ''These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch," then morphs into a Tom-like character from ''The Glass Menagerie" in ''Summer at the Lake." The sequence also suggests the presence of the playwright himself, as the protagonists go from a beleaguered young man to an artist on death's door, thrown aside by a feckless society constantly on the hunt for something new.
In ''Five by Tenn" we see a playwright developing his voice with his early works, and writing about homosexuality and death with frankness and lucidity in his later ones. If the situations don't lend themselves to movies starring Marlon Brando and Liz Taylor, they are nonetheless poetic and distinctive. And they round out the Williams oeuvre in profoundly personal terms.
